I’d like to give this last column of the year over to some readers who’ve been writing in with their comments, concerns, and other things to share.
From my former student Gina Verdolaga — who’s been around the world and some — came two questions at the end of her message:
“Your personal parade-of-pants essay entertained me immensely. Indeed, degustibus non est disputandum. I recall elephant pants, hot pants, harem pants (that displayed aerodynamic properties when twirled on the dance floor), and BangBang! denims from Hong Kong. Wearing funky BB! meant your parents were, as they say, ‘can afford.’ Fast track to leggings, bootleg, capri, then skinny jeans (pencil-cut redux). These days, I’m in tokong surf pants without the surf.
“By the way, could you kindly explain the function of the little mysterious square known as the ‘secret pocket?’ Why was that a male domain/concern? And what about unabashed high-rise thong underwear? Don’t make me go there!”
Well, Gina, I don’t have much to say at the moment about thongs and such — it’ll be added to my long list of research priorities — but secret pockets I can certainly advance a conjecture about, as a self-respecting ‘60s “Amboy” who wouldn’t have dreamt of walking around in his tailored “Burlington” jeans, button-down oxford shirt, and cordovan mocs (with lily-white sport socks, natch) without a secret pocket stitched into a not-so-secret place — right above the semi-horizontal slit that was your regular pocket. (Just years earlier, at the height of the rage for the beltless, clip-on “continental” cut, the same secret pocket was a discreet wink in the belt line; in the ’70s, it migrated to the inside of the waistband, beside the rubber strips that helped keep your pants up.)
So much for ancient history. Why secret pockets? You’re right, it’s a guy thing — girls don’t have them. (Well — let’s just all nicely agree they don’t. In fact, Beng keeps complaining that women’s clothes, in general, suffer from a paucity of pockets; my jackets all have inner pockets for passports, tickets, etc., but hers don’t.)
My first explanation for these mini pants pockets is a practical and therefore corny one: back when you could get from Cubao to Diliman with a 10-centavo coin and the pedestrian’s nemesis was the ubiquitous mandurukot, it made good sense to stash some loose change into that pocket, so you could get home just in case without having to bother some surly police sergeant. It was more a psychological crutch than anything: you were insured by sartorial foresight against the world’s wiliest fingers. If you couldn’t feel someone poking into your secret pocket, then you might as well have been dead to the world — a world that deserved to end, if a 20-centavo coin (yes, boys and girls, they came in twenties then, and it could buy you a Coke) was worth picking your holy of holies for. (In 1967, the National Treasurer estimated that P3.86 million worth of coins was lodged in secret pockets all over the archipelago.)
My second theory has to do with fingers — yours, the wearer’s. Don’t ask me why, but guys love to stick their hands in pockets. It pacifies them, makes them feel cool, comfortable, and pleasantly occupied. They can twiddle their fingers all they want inside pockets, or scratch some even more secret itch. In idle moments, daydreaming about Ipanema or Barbarella (folks, if you don’t know the reference, so sorry), a guy might find his forefinger straying into his secret pocket and pawing the fabric of the lining there — something like scratching your chin, but less obtrusively, so as not to embarrass yourself or whoever you may be speaking or listening to with your wildly vagrant distractions.
Sad to say, secret pockets long went out of fashion, which probably explains why men are less pensive these days and more prone to outbursts of baboonish expressiveness. At least that’s what I think.
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From reader Ted Limpoco — a true-blue Atenean judging by the company he keeps — came this reaction to my second-anniversary musings on blogging:
“I agree that frontier-less literature is a cute misperception, even with the broadened possibilities of cyberspace. Most Internet users are urban and cosmopolitan, which immediately marginalizes a substantial number of readers and consumers of literature. I do not have the romantic notion that my blog (http://stickslip.wordpress.com/) reaches legions of readers. The audience that I have in mind are the few friends who know about my blog, and, hopefully, casual strangers that accidentally come upon it and just so happen to share my interests. Given that I do not purposefully seek out blogsites myself, and just stick to the few that are my friends’, I presume that the latter group is perhaps statistically insignificant. But, the possibility still exists, and I cling to it out of my own need to have an audience as a writer.
“I used to write a bit of poetry before I left for graduate school in the US. I was miserable during my first year here, and what helped me the most was my small investment in a Moleskine notebook that encouraged a modest habit of journal keeping. I tried keeping journals before without success, perhaps because of my aversion to gushing, lurid confessionals. I like keeping myself in check — in other words, to edit myself. My friend Rofel Brion asked me if I would consider collecting my émigré e-mails/journal entries and publishing them. I felt that, somehow, the written page was not the proper home of these informal wandering texts. And then I discovered the possibilities of the blogosphere through my friend, the Mindanao artist Jean Claire Dy (http://jeanclairedy.wordpress.com/), and have been blogging ever since.
“I love the open, unstructured format, and also its immediacy. This gives the form a certain exuberance that attracts youth. This also makes the need for self-editing more urgent, which I continue to strive for. Most of all, for me, the blog is a way to converse, with friends, with like-minded people, and — as Jonathan Franzen says in How to Be Alone — with writers I love to read.
“I read or heard somewhere that people marry essentially to find a person to be a witness to their lives. I think the same need is at work here. It can have extreme narcissistic manifestations in the form of reality TV, but it also drives great writing that connects us with people and with our inner selves. The blog can be both.
“Somehow, after finishing a blog entry, I feel the same way I do after e-mailing friends, which is just not the same feeling I get when I write in my Moleskine journal: I feel less alone.”
Very well put, Ted. It’s unusual, though, that you even think of self-editing, when many blogs seem to be written for precisely the opposite purpose — to serve as a bedpan for a kind of digital diarrhea. But then again that’s literature in its infinite and ineluctable variety, the vigor that comes with rawness and audacity. Here’s to both livelier and more thoughtful blogging in 2008.
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Pettizou Tayag, vice president of the Quiz Bee Foundation, reports that that the 28th National Quiz Bee — the country’s longest-running and most respected academic competition — has reached its National Grand Finals. The two-part finals opened yesterday and will end on Jan. 6 at the Development Academy of the Philippines Auditorium in Tagaytay City. They will be shown on Studio 23 from 6 to 7:30 pm.
The regional contenders in the subject categories of Elementary Makabayan (Philippine history, culture and sports), Elementary Mathematics, High School Science and Technology, and Collegiate General Information and International Affairs had to beat six million student aspirants to get to Tagaytay.
Aside from the competition itself, the finalists and their teacher-coaches also enjoyed a four-day all expense paid live-in camp with tours, seminars, and fellowships in what’s been called the “Summit of the Super Quiz Bees” in preparation for the competition.
Substantial, education-oriented prizes will be won by the students, their coaches, and their schools, divisions, and regions.
As a high-school quiz team captain myself, I can only root for my fellow nerds, who’ll probably end up writing columns instead of nursing anterior cruciate ligament injuries. How can you think of basketball when there’s Avogadro’s number and the value of pi to figure out?
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Language and communications expert Dr. Dups de los Reyes wrote in to say that his new book Watch Your English is now available at National Book Store and Fully Booked.
A fellow alumnus of the UP English department, “Dr. Dups” is a much sought-after resource person for seminars and training programs on corporate and interpersonal communication. As I noted in the book’s blurb, which I was glad to provide, “In simple, clear, informative, and engaging chapters — many of which will make you laugh as you learn — the author walks us through the minefield of English, reminding us of the subtle but important differences between infer and imply, stationery and stationary, and so on. He takes the pain out of learning and remembering grammar and usage, and provides helpful exercises to consolidate the lessons.
“Watch Your English is a book that will be of great help to students and professionals, but more than a guide to better English, it’s fun to read on its own. If our language tells us and others who we are, then Watch Your English has a lot to reveal about ourselves—and how to use English to our best advantage at home, in the classroom, and in the office.”
Check it out!
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.